Trawl a few forums for advice on which high-end graphics card to buy at the moment and you’ll likely hit a torrent of scorn that implies you’re wasting your money, that the consoles are holding back PC game engine development and that you’re Hitler in disguise (there’s always someone who has to lower the tone).

Finally! Today NVIDIA releases their highly anticipated GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 cards. While the initial announcement of the Fermi architecture was back in 2009, the actual cards are being released just now. NVIDIA has radically redesigned their GPU in order to bring maximum performance for DirectX 11 - especially tesselation. You can read more about the Fermi architecture here.

Asustek, Sapphire and XFX Prep ATI Radeon HD 5970 4GB

The launch if Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce GTX 400-series graphics boards is getting closer and it looks like ATI’s add-in-board partners are gearing up for this launch just like Nvidia’s allies. At least three manufacturers of graphics cards are preparing to release factory-overclocked ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics boards with 4GB of memory, which will raise performance bar for high-end accelerators.

With ATI having sewn up the DX11 market up until at least January following the continued delay on the first products based on Nvidia’s Fermi architecture, the Radeon HD 5870 is going to be our high-end card of choice for a while yet – or at least it would be if ATI were actually able to deliver a fraction of the cards to meet demand.